This seems to be grounded in US law. Does anyone know if the same rules would apply in eg EU law?
Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#12I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.
It's not wishful thinking, and ownership isn't a foregone conclusion.
Sure the courts could mint a communist society with a few weird decisions about property rights, but this being the US do you really suppose that's likely?
There's really no legal question of any kind that models aren't people and therefore cannot own property (and also cannot enter into legal contract as would be required to reassign the intellectual property they don't and can't own)
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#13The "if you generated the code at work using company tools, it's owned by your employer" affirmation in the article makes no sense to me?
If computer generated code is not copyrightable, ownership cannot be reassigned either.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#14This is all well and good as an intellectual exercise, but in real life none of this matters. Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat. I've written the same chunks of code for a number of employers as has every engineer. We've all taken chunks from stack overflow and other places without carefully considering attribution. This comes up in a few places as a kind of vin…
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
Then why does reverse engineered code need to be a clean room implementation?
Ask any emulator developer or the developers of ReactOS
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#15[deleted]
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#16First answer who owns the model built with public data
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#17This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from…
Ok what about all the Anthropic’s engineers who say they don’t write code at all and it’s 100% AI-generated?
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#18The "if you generated the code at work using company tools, it's owned by your employer" affirmation in the article makes no sense to me? If computer generated code is not copyrightable, ownership cannot be reassigned either.
It is copyrightable. A *human* can copyright code they wrote.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#19This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from…
No such assumption is made in the article.
Nor does it give a single answer.
Mere prompting is still not enough for copyright, and the problem is unsolved on how much contribution a human needs to make to the generated code.
In the case for generated images copyright has been assigned only to the human-modified parts.
Even worse, it will be slightly different in other nations.
The only one that accepts copyright for the unchanged output of a prompt is China.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#20This is all well and good as an intellectual exercise, but in real life none of this matters. Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat. I've written the same chunks of code for a number of employers as has every engineer. We've all taken chunks from stack overflow and other places without carefully considering attribution. This comes up in a few places as a kind of vin…
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat.
You'd be surprised! Among non-software management types, they often think of the code as extremely valuable IP and a trade secret. I'm a CTO and I've made comments before to non/less technical peers about how the code (generally speaking) isn't that big of a secret, and I routinely get shocked expressions. In one case the company almost passed on a big contract because it required disclosure of the source code (with an NDA). When I told them that was a silly reason and explained why, they got it, but the old way of thinking still permeates and is a hard habit to break.
Edit: Fixed errant copy pasta error. Glad that wasn't a password :-)